Internet-accessible marketplaces in which sellers offer goods or services for sale or barter to prospective buyers are well-known. Traditional web sites like eBay® and Yahoo!® Auctions were some of the earliest and most popular sites on the Web. More recently, P2P sharing sites (e.g., Airbnb, Uber, and others) have expanded the ability of individuals to seek out and obtain information, goods and services. While these sites and services provide significant advantages to the individuals using them, to retain their value (at least for the service provider offering them), these types of marketplaces generally need to keep the buyer and seller from directly connecting with one another and exchanging personal information, at least during the time period during which negotiations occur. Otherwise, the service provider becomes disintermediated, and its value is negated as the buyer and seller can easily circumvent the provider's revenue collection model. Service providers have attempted to address this problem by various techniques, both technical (private messaging systems to ensure that a buyer and seller cannot broker a deal outside of the site/service) and non-technical (e.g., terms-of-use restrictions, contract restrictions, and the like).
These solutions, however, are costly, and in many cases do not adequately address the problems in the art.